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How they get the performance by Ken Knight To start with the acceleration  is accomplished through what is commonly referred to in the computer industry as "Client / Server" technology. We, the Starband users are consider the client.  The Server side of the equation is located at the NOC (Network Operations Center).  Together these to individual units make up your acceleration technology. The technology is officially known as IPA or Internet Page Accelerator.  Each individual piece also has it's own name.  The client side is called RPA also known as the AS_Agent.  The server side is called the HPA or Host Page Accelerator. What I've done below is given you a graphical representation of what actually happens when you tell your browser to go to a particular web site. The RPA appears to be acting as a server in itself.  What happens, is you request a web page from a site, your browser then starts sending several requests to the RPA.  The RPA catches these request into a storage queue, and forwards the initial request through dish, over the satellite and straight to the HPA located in the NOC.  Here the HPA then acts as though it is the one actually requesting the page and starts gathering up all the page elements it will take to make the page complete, it then starts streaming the page back to the RPA on your computer at which point it will reassemble and pass the requested data back to your browser.  The whole time your browser thinks it actually went directly to the site and got these items itself. As you can see from the illustration, you generally see multiple requests between your browser and the RPA, however, in most cases you see only one request go over to the HPA, and then several packets start streaming back into the RPA.  What's really brilliant about this technology is that it requires no DNS on the client side.  The DNS request is actually done by the HPA Server in the NOC.  So at least if DNS happens to go down for you locally, the probability of you being able to continue to surf the web should be high.   Especially if their network infrastructure is mapped out properly. To determine what ports actually appeared to have listeners on them, I shut down everything that I possibly could and found the following ports to be active: 135, 445, 1025, 9877.  If you currently own a Starband unit, you're probably already aware of port 9877.   This is the main one that they tell you to point your browser to.  It appears to be acting as a simple tunnel between your browser and the RPA.  Port 135 is generally used for name-services.  However, I'm not sure what they're using port 1025 for.  Also there are several UDP listeners, some are matching the TCP ports, others just appear to be client sessions. Now for a quick disclaimer.  Everything that you have just read is based on my own research of the IPA.  It is possible that some of this could be inaccurate.  Especially what happens over in the Server side.  If you happen to know for a fact that something in this article is inaccurate, please contact me and I'll make sure it's corrected immediately.